A lot has been happening with Jamoma at a fairly quick pace during and since the Jamoma workshops in France. I thought I would highlight a couple of things that have been going on in more detail than is present in the change logs…

User Interfaces

One change that may be noticeable, but is otherwise trivial, is that we changed the default skin used for the look of the built-in user interface. I had been thinking about this for a few months, but it was sparked by some comments Trond made at the workshop. First, Trond was preferring for them to be as simple as possible. Ideally we could get a graphic designer to do them. The point is that they should not be so distracting or drawing the eye in ways that are not fruitful… The emphasis should be on the information that is important at the time. While that last point is quite difficult, I believe we’ve made a step in the right direction.

The difference colors between module types is also more subtle. And finally, we all realized a need at the workshop to place some emphasis on using modules without the built-in interface. For many this will mean building your own interface and just using the module like a normal Max object.

Snake Redux

Since some of our conversations toward the end of the workshop in Albi I have been trying to figure out what role, if any, the snake should continue to play in our development efforts. My current thoughts on it follow…

The current multi-cable is fast, but it cannot be used for dynamic routing.

The snake, on the other hand, should be used for dynamic routing, but will need to do internal buffering to make this possible. This means that the CPU cost of the snake will be equivalent to the cost for using send_/receive pairs on the signals that it is passing. In the limited case of a matrix router, this should not be a problem because a send~/receive pair must be used anyway to break the signal chain of logical feedback.

Thus it seems that there would still be use for both the multi-cable and the snake.

One idea which was raised when we were in Paris was to use Jitter objects and pass matrices for the snake. However, we don’t want to require Jitter for audio modules if at all possible. It isn’t clear though, because perhaps we can use simple matrices without Jitter somehow?

Window shade and screen layout

Trond made the analogy that modules being visible at a given time are like the staves visible in a cutaway score at a given time. They are visible or invisible are when they are communicating

Propaganda

One thing I was trying to get to in my presentation at the Albi workshop were some of the ideas in this: http://www.scribemedia.org/2006/07/09/dhh/

In particular, the 3rd segment of the video (03) from roughly 2:00 minutes to roughly 5:15. In this segment David Heinemeier Hansson is discussing the philosophical reasons for a structured framework approach to web development (specifically using Ruby on Rails). Particularly resonant is the idea that “Decisions are bad,” but many of the ideas from Ruby on Rails have been influential in how I think about Max development and Jamoma.